Looking Back: October Reading

31 October 2015

I took a few weeks off from this little blogosphere, so it was a fairly quiet month here... but that's not to say there wasn't a hell of a lot of reading.

On audio, I wrapped up Uprooted,a quick, fun take on the classic damsel-in-distress fairy tale; devoured Sharp Objects,a dark and fairly fucked up murder mystery with the most dysfunctional of families; abandoned Cleopatra after remembering that narrative non-fiction really doesn't click for me on audio; and am now working on A Tale of Two Cities, which I'm enjoying with the help of Cliffsnotes (truly!) to make sure I'm keeping track of who's who and what's where.

I powered through several review deadlines for a great stack of books: Bohemian Gospel (look for my review in Shelf Awareness in November); Ashley Bell (my review is here along with an interview with Dean Koontz himself!); and The Japanese Lover, a complex and incredibly well done historical fiction novel from Isabel Allende (on sale in November); The Heart Goes Last (not my favorite of Atwood's works, but I liked it well enough).

And last, but certainly not least: the backlist. This time of year is one of my favorites as reviews tend to slow down for the holidays, so I can focus on those books I've been accumulating. I got a jumpstart on that with the Readathon, during which I gobbled up the very, very, excellent Fates and Furies (seriously, this book is SO excellent); followed by the emotional, complicated, intelligent writing of Claudia Rankine's Citizen. Continuing the trend of heartbreaking, incredible, impressive and depressing novels, I finally got around to Salvage the Bonesby Jesmyn Ward.

OK. That's all I've got. For now. (Usually these monthly round-ups are smaller because I drop off the books I didn't really love... but this month was a truly stellar one as reading goes, if not as writing does.)